


Left And Right In The Dark

by Septim



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Catamite Saves The World, Cyrodiil Was Better In The First Pocket Guide, Gen, I Joke About Dying And Being Dead, Imperial But Only In The Census, Is That A Gladius At Your Side Or Are You Just Happy To See Me Citizen, M/M, My Sexuality Is General Tullius, Original Character(s), The Gods Gave Me Looks To Make Up For My Shite Life, The Sins Of The Father Are The Sins Of The Son
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 00:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10399347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septim/pseuds/Septim
Summary: It is the second century of the 4th Era, and Amerigo Metaxian wishes the Cyrodilic Empire would just crawl off and die. Born to a Nibenese traitor and a cult witch, he no longer has any allegiance to a province glad to eat its own. Sadly, the gods have a sick sense of humor, and decided to make him into the Empire's best chance at redemption: Dragonborn.[Inspired by Sunderlorn's Simra Hishkari series, this work borrows world-building (and a certain Imperial mercenary officer) heavily from it. Go read it, it's amazing.]





	1. Chapter 1

_Magicka wasted,_ thought Amerigo. To heal a split lip for what was, surely to be, a permanent residence in the dungeons of Castle Dour meant less magicka for his escape.

One week today. Two guard shifts per day, a single meal in the morning and afternoon: always a stew, more broth than meat or vegetables, and a piece of hardened bread. Water, sometimes, if the guards on duty felt magnanimous. The Nords were the kindest. The Imperials wouldn’t want to speak to a traitor beyond what their duties required.

Amerigo couldn’t blame them. Not only was he a traitor, but his father as well. Desertion was a serious crime in Cyrodiil, more so when the person who committed it was an officer in the Legions. Desertion was treason, and in an empire were the ‘Emperor is the Law, and the Law is Sacred’, an officer given his commission by none other than the Emperor himself committed nothing less than high treason.

More than twenty years had passed, and Antolios Metaxian still found ways to doom his son.

Helping the jarl of Whiterun had been a mistake. Should’ve kept a low profile. Never gone to Helgen, saved the auburn-haired, strapping Nord. _And then what,_ his conscience churned, the self-shame of caring about others turning his stomach more hollow than it already was, _then you’d have a dead Nord, and hasn’t there been enough death?_

He wouldn’t cry. The very stones, slimy with moisture, mocked his thirst. To mourn his cursed heritage was to pick at non-existent scabs. It was done and over with.

Tears stung at the corner of his eyes. But, where pity for himself had been moments before, anger bloomed instead.

He didn’t like this. Ever since the dragon soul, it’d grown, burrowed into his psyche, so deep Amerigo couldn’t say where it ended and he began. All of what the dragon had been, its inhuman wrath and power and fear and melancholy, all in him now. His nails dig into the cell’s stone flooring, scrambling for anchoring against a coming tide of emotions he can’t, didn’t comprehend.

Yet that was a lie. The part of himself he wanted to nurture—the part that, for some inexplicable reason still wanted to believe there was some good in this world—didn’t want to.

The baser part of himself, however, wanted it. Was hungry for it. Simmering, lurking beneath, that predator’s mindset he couldn’t be rid of, merely subdue for some time, stirred into a frenzy in the battle against the dragon in Whiterun. Battleblood, some called it. He’d heard Nords in the underground talking about it. But they made it sound like a trance, a blessing from their austere gods. For Amerigo, it just left him feel unsettled, ashamed.

Tongue tip on a hard mash of scar tissue inside his cheek, Amerigo traces the deep furrow left by his own knife.

One week too long with his own thoughts. If he was to rot in this cell, let it be sooner than later.

* * *

Three weeks later, the guards remove Amerigo from his cell. Stretched lean from a month of wasting, waiting, every turn, every step, becomes a personal torture. Not carried, but dragged, the sword-callused fingers of the soldier on his left digging into his armpit. Amerigo focuses on the pain, more than he’s felt in the shared boredom and uneasiness of these past days.

It is raining outside. Not only does the stone, block-cut in a style like Bruma’s, reek of it, the walls amplify the sound down in the dungeons. A castle that’s seen better days, fit for Solitude and its Wolf Queen.

 _New horrors reside here now,_ thinks Amerigo. An uncaring empire, besieged, eager to reclaim its ancient glory. The times of the Septims are unliving memories, tales given to the children of the empire to remind them that, once, the land they lived in was great, to keep them from seeing the rot all around them. To instill a sense of pride in accomplishments long gone by. To turn that into obedience for an Empire, a government, whose time was long past.

The Cyrodilic Empire was a dying beast. The Colovian West refused to admit it. The Nibenese East knew it, yet was content to let it die a slow death.

Cyrodiil was a province filled with cravens.

Once, Amerigo cared. Still bore promises made to old and self-made gods, etched into his skin. “Bone and blood, red and gold,” the mantra went, each syllable driving more ink under his skin, “There is no rule but the rule of Akatosh.” At the time, awash in a sea of religious vainglory, it’d been his choice.

From right breast to wrist, the tattoo thrums, displeased. The black magicks of Potema, leeching from the castle walls? Or just weeks worth of filth clinging to his skin? It shamed him. By the gods, if he was to die...

While one guard walks ahead, another props him up. Ungentle—but not unkind—he’s dragged into a side room. No exit but the one they came through. No windows either. Somehow, it is darker here than it was below in the dungeons. Unable to muster the strength for a Candlelight, Amerigo blinks repeatedly, waiting for this eyes to adjust.

“Oh, blessed Al-Esh, Paravant, Mother of Cyrods!” A wooden tub, filled to the brim with clear, cool water. Next to it, a stout table, a hard cake of soap and a careworn towel, the neatness of the fold an amusing contrast. No strigil or oil but, instead, a pumice stone, red-black, the sort that littered even the humblest of bath houses in the Imperial City.

“You have thirty minutes. Do not get dressed.” The command strikes Amerigo as pointless—the rags they put him in are stiff with sweat, grime. It’d be public service not to wear them, to burn them. Amerigo would, now, if he didn’t know the smell of smoke would set off his captors.

The water turns grease-gray in minutes, sun-browned skin pink from overzealous rubbings with the stone. His piercings, one through each nipple and one through his cock, no longer itch and pull. He cleans between metal and skin, working strength through his limbs.

But there's still a beard. Once, it would’ve looked good, dashing even, on his high cheekboned face. But now two deep scars, each from the corner of his lips, ran across the length of his cheeks, asymmetrical. Facial hair also made him look too much like his father, like the image he’d internalized all these years. Luckily, someone had the foresight to leave a razor—too dull to function as a weapon, but sharp enough for its purpose—on top of the towel. Amerigo rubbed the soap on this cheeks, his chin and mouth, until he could taste the florid bitterness of the lather. Lacking a mirror and making due with the poor reflection in the steel of blade itself, it was a hack job of a shave.

 _Better, but worse._ Presentable, to whomever he was to be presented to—Amerigo knew that Imperial justice guaranteed a bath prior to a sentence, an ancient custom derived from the laws codified after the slave revolts, back when the Ayleids denied humanity by denying hygiene of their slaves.

But the soap? Whoever he was seeing, they were important enough to mask his musk with olive oil.

As Amerigo toweled his hair dry, the guards returned. “Time’s up,” they barked in unison, fingers on the hilt of their swords. Amerigo raised his palms in mock surrender, letting the towel drop with a wet plop. The guards stare, unmoving, tranced.

Amerigo flashed them a cheeky grin, civil disobedience in the sway of his hips.

One of the guards hits Amerigo square on the side, dropping him to his knees. The other grabs him by the arms, roughly pulls him up, and drags him out of the room once more.

“All this cloak and dagger.” Up and up and up, Castle Dour never seems to end. The occasional scandalized gasp from the castle’s servants brightens Amerigo’s mood, if only for a moment. Quickly, it all becomes tedious. _Let it end, let it end, let it—_

A heavy wooden door opens. Amerigo is thrown into a long, crimson carpet, the Imperial Seal woven in golden, shimmering threads. Beams of light filter from above, dust dancing at their center. Amerigo looks up, sees a war table—a leather map of Skyrim, spanning the entire table’s surface, figurines of ivory caved into bears and dragons on top.

“Stand up, _citizen_.” This voice, different from the rest, commands attention, purposely injects venom at the end of its sentence. As if personally disappointed the current specimen lying on its fancy rug is such a poor example of _dignitas_ , _severitas_. “I am General Tullius, Military Governor of Skyrim, and loyal servant of the Cyrodilic Empire. You stand accused of two counts of high treason, four counts of violating the White-Gold Concordat, conspiring against Emperor Titus Mede II, forgery, theft, murder, and _impertinence_.”

“Tell me,” the General demands, stepping from behind the war table, right into Amerigo’s field of view, “Why shouldn’t I see your head rolling from your lifeless body?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm ESL (Spanish), so I always appreciate any comments reading my spelling/grammar—especially the later, I have problems with tenses still.

Cataloged. Glossed. Prodded, like cattle. The runed rod the Synod magus uses to trace the contours of Amerigo’s tattoo sizzles on contact; magicka-on-magicka, a positive feedback that left Amerigo’s skin cold, clammy. No amount of hissing, of recoiling, stopped the discomfort.

“I thought I was being sentenced, not studied.”

“You are being sentenced,” the magus cut in, acid-slow, tapping the wand on Amerigo’s bicep with a tsk-tsk. “You wear your crimes on your skin. Therefore, we are forced to record it.” A scholar, pleased at the sound of his own voice, the authority it ought to carry simply by virtue of his title.

“What, _Magickal Markings: The Sacred Art of The Niben_ , can’t tell you what they are?” Amerigo despised these scholars. Studying, recording, euphemisms for plundering—these simpering Synod lackeys saw living people as long-lost relics, teachings lessons. If the fetters crushing his wrists weren’t enchanted to stunt his magicka pool to uselessness, Amerigo would’ve burnt half this face off.

“Your insolence suits you, savage. But it does you no good to spit on the General’s hospitality.” Hawkish face, an unsettling pallor, consequence of hours of indoor work, surely, not necromantic tendencies—the Imperial colleges still considered the dark arts an unpleasant school of magic. And this mage lacked the malice for it. All soft hands, hushed whispers.

Healer.

“Fuck you.”

The magus finished his assessment. The rod gets put away into a lacquered, cushioned box, black as night. He makes a show of it—the placement of his instrument, turning the box so everyone gets to see its filigreed top. Overcompensating. Amerigo bites his lip not to laugh.

“It is my expert opinion that these marks correspond to the Cult of the Dragonborn, near Cheydinhal. The swirling clouds are meant to represent Cloud Ruler Temple, lost to the Thalmor as part of the campaign against—”

“Thank you, magus,” General Tullius interrupted, arms crossed. Thank the gods someone else tired of this servile, pathetic display. “You may leave. Bring in the next witness.”

“Err, right, yes, of course.” Behind his back, Amerigo waved him off.

Pettiness ebbs into confusion. Why is the General so intent in giving a traitor a fair trial? Why all the ceremony? Was it because of who he was? Who Amerigo was? Or what Amerigo represented?

It’d been a year since Amerigo arrived in Skyrim. A solid amount of time to reflect on what his identity as Dragonborn meant—nothing good, if history was the measuring stick. An impossible standard set forth by cultural heroes like Reman Cyrodiil, Tiber Septim, Saint Alessia Herself. Even if the dragon soul swirling in his belly hungered for more, Amerigo refused to believe it still.

That doom-driven hunger. It was a curse, the reason why his life spiraled out of control, into this mess. Shamed, exiled. The gods and their sick sense of humor.  
  
But the gods are real—and religion is not. So he’d be careful not to curse their names too much.

“This is the last witness,” the General warns, hands on the time-worn smoothness of the table, leaning over it. Everything about the Colovian is spartan, ascetic. Career soldier, from the freshly waxed leather of his pteruges to the closely cropped, snow-white hair on his head. Tanned skin, not congenital, but acquired in the field—long marches across the wheat-covered fields of the West Weald, the briny breeze of the Gold Coast. Some of it training, but most of it, where Tullius cut his teeth, made a name for himself, Amerigo knew to be the Great War.

 _Why are you here, General? Who did you piss off?_  
  
How Amerigo hated officers.

* * *

  _The last witness is Hadvar. I consider suicide, but find my magicka pool wanting. Right, I’m hexed. No immolation this time._

_“He saved my life, sir,” he begins, provincial accent turning his sentences soothing, matter-of-factly. “I went into the keep to get the townspeople to safety. The Stormcloaks had the same idea. I got injured inside.”_

_That explains the sword Hadvar took to his side. Although his ribs had stopped most of the damage, it’d been a dead stab—nothing deadly in its own right, but deadly enough after aggravating it by gallivanting all over a fort._

_“Like I said in my report, we were able to fight most of them off. But things got muddled, and I lost a lot of blood. I ended up in the cave that connects to the fort. I think I passed out for a couple of hours,” and Hadvar laughs, like the death-seeking idiot that he is, “And next thing I know he’s staring at me,” and he looks at me, of course he looks at me, with those big, bright, foolish eyes of his, “Shaking me awake.”_

_“He told me his name was Hadrian.” And I swear, at that moment, I wish Oblivion would take me._

_“You lied,” Tullius comments, boring holes into my shoulder. Is he surprised? Surprised that the criminal lied? His face is like slate._

_“I do that, lie,” I say for lack of anything wittier, sourness at the center of my tongue. Hadvar shoots me a glare; half-disappointment, half-fury._

_I do that a lot too, disappoint people._

_Because I’m not good for people._

_I make them unhappy._

_“You lied, yet you saved this soldier’s life.” Tullius circles the table in measured steps, the clink of his greaves growing faint, loud, then faint again. A predator closing in for the kill._

_Me._

_“Not just him, I’m afraid, but all of Whiterun.” The General grabs a crisply-pressed letter under a stack of scrolls. I can see the tendons underneath the thin skin of his massive hand strain under the unnecessary force. “Jarl Balgruuf himself sent me a letter begging me to spare your life!” I’m not sure who the General is trying to convince of this letter’s existence: himself, threateningly waving it like he’s going to slap me with it, or me, who recognizes the torn wax imprint as Balgruuuf’s personal seal. “Do you understand the diplomatic trap you have put me in, citizen? If I kill you, I kill the Dragonborn. I kill a powerful symbol in Nordic legend, making the Empire out to be more of a villain than Ulfric the Pretender and his rebellion already paint us as. I piss on the jarl’s hero and a strategic hold we desperately need if we’re to win this war.”_

_I’m amazed the General hasn’t run out of air yet. In the tautness of his arms, the clenched muscles of his jaw, I saw the drive to murder. And who would blame him? Prosecute him? If he were to slit my throat, right now, it’d be justice under the Imperial judiciary system._

_“But if I don’t kill you, what kind of message does that send to Cyrodiil, to Tamriel? ‘The Empire has gone soft’ traitors will think all over this continent. ‘The Empire can’t even uphold its own laws!’ It is a shit show, Metaxian, and you’re the cause of it!”_

_“A month of gathering evidence, cross-checking both Imperial and Nordic laws, deliberation. Already you have cost this empire precious resources we cannot afford to waste. So…”_

_So I’m dead. I’m getting crucified. In a hour. While I slowly die of exhaustion and asphyxiation, crows will peck at my eyes, my naked body. My body will not be returned to Cyrodiil, but left to rot until nothing remains. My corpse will be a public spectacle, a deterrent for those who think of breaking the Empire’s laws as thoroughly as I have._

_I’d be lying if I said I’m not afraid. While I’m good at lying to other people, I’ve never been good at lying to myself._

_“These are the terms,” the General dictates, motioning for his notary to ready a quill. “You will sign on for two terms: twenty-five years for yourself, and twenty-five years for those your father stole. You will serve as a discurion, but you will not receive the privileges usually granted to the rank, nor full pay. You will be watched. You will report to your tessarion weekly. If you do not, you will be found and executed for the traitor that you are—crucified, facing away from Cyrodiil.”_

_I swallow. My mouth is ash. My throat closes up, raw, thick. I know I’m crying—the salt stings my abraded, cut-up cheeks. I don’t dare look at Hadvar, because I know he’s staring at me, his gaze is on me, and it’s pity, gods-forsaken, daedra-damned pity, and I don’t need it, I don’t deserve it._

_“Citizen, I need an answer.”_

_“Metaxian! Answer me—do you accept these terms?”_

_“YES! Yes, gods, I accept!”_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for how long this last chapter took. A lot of personal problems cropped up during this absence, but now I'm back.
> 
> If you want to see in-game screenshots from this story, go to http://metaxian.tumblr.com

The noise of Solitude ceased inside the courtyard. That, in itself, was unsettling.

So was the fury in the eyes of the otherwise mild-mannered Nord.

“You lied to me! You lied to my uncle, my aunt, my cousin. You lied to all of us!”

“Gods’ almighty.”

The day’s ordeals left Amerigo uncharitable, and more so due to Hadvar’s involvement. It’d been his detailed report, his familiarity with Amerigo’s tactics, that helped the Empire trap the Dragonborn. The irony of the situation—succor turned into a sentence—left the root of Amerigo’s tongue bitter.

“What was I supposed to tell your uncle, the blacksmith? ‘My name is Amerigo Metaxian, and I’m a traitor. May I stay the night?’”

“I don’t think…” Hadvar thought visibly—scrunched up nose, muscular arms crossed, fingertips drumming on his biceps. Certainly not a man given to deceit, Amerigo resented how blatant the Nord could be. To have the freedom to be unguarded, to be so open. Only an idyllic, rustic life in the provinces could form a man so incapable of putting up the barest of defenses.

No wonder Tullius assigned him as Amerigo’s keeper.

“You’re a fool. A well-meaning fool, but still a fool,” the judgment sounded harsher in Amerigo’s mind. Here, somehow, in Hadvar’s presence, it flattened, edging towards playful. The exact dynamic they’d shared in Riverwood. “If you think this is anything but politics, you don’t know this empire as well as I do.”

Hadvar turned, tumultuous. “The General saved your life!”

“The General,” Amerigo’s voice softened, injecting his statement with condescension, “Is a politician. This wasn’t done out of the goodness of his heart, but what’s most beneficial for his military campaign. Think about it.”

A civil war. A dead emperor. The threat of dragons, and the Aldmeri Dominion’s dagger ever closer to the General’s throat. Amerigo did not envy Tullius’ position—surely there were whispers of the General’s incompetence at the Elder Council. The Colovian military families were sure to call for a court martial soon enough. Gods, the summons were likely already in the hands of some hapless courier.

“We need you,” Hadvar said in Helgen. And here, again. “We could really use someone like you.” For a fleeting moment, Amerigo was touched—a form of validation, a rarity in his life. But, as always, the anger and shame crawled back into his chest, burying into the permanent hollow they made for themselves.

“Whatever you see in me, Hadvar, it’s not there.”

* * *

_I’ve spent two silver terci extremely well, i.e, like an arse. I refuse Hadvar’s offer to buy me proper food at a proper inn and, instead, purchase at a stall a bowl of sweet fried rice, refusing the cook’s offer of a small cut of venison on religious grounds._

_“You don’t eat meat,” he said, as if it were an epiphany._

_“I’m an Alessian,” I tell him, as if it means anything to him._

_We make a strange pair, I think—a soldier of the Legions, clad in seasoned steel armor. (I wonder what deeds Hadvar accomplished to earn the metal in my absence, for I distinctly recall him wearing a leather set with chain-mail reinforcements around the shoulder area when we first met.) And me, a Nibenese criminal in the bright cloths of my homeland, reds and golds and blues standing strikingly out of place against the dreary grays and browns of Solitude._

_It is a city that wished it could be the Imperial City. But it is too cold, high up on a natural arch plagued by bitter winds, overlooking not the warm, greenish-azure waters of Lake Rumare, but the Sea of Ghosts. Its architecture is a strange blend of Imperial wood and Nordic stone. I think of Bruma, and everything that went wrong there._

_The noise, at least, is a lot like the City’s. The stink, however, is suppressed by the colder weather. Small blessings. The gods are not done with me._

_Hadvar seemed intent in showcasing Solitude, taking me through its winding streets with the zeal of an excited child. I do not have the courage to inform him that, once you live in the Waterfront, the Market District and the Imperial Sewers themselves, other cities become disappointingly underwhelming. Even the pickpockets lack the grace and speed of your humble City thief._

_The month in the dungeons, magicka poisoned and shackled, left me without the energy to protest much. My wit, faltered. Quips and puns that would’ve sent a room into peals of laughter are met by a pale wall of muscle. Hadvar strikes me as a man not keen on word play. Can he read? He must be able to read, if he’s an officer in the Legions. If not, he’s being exploited, possibly through contract. The possibilities are fascinating. Yet, somehow, the idea of Hadvar being taken advantage of upsets me._

* * *

“So you’re not being exploited.”

“I signed up when I was old enough,” Hadvar explained, tearing into a turkey drumstick with thick, callused fingers. “I thought about becoming a blacksmith, like Uncle Alvor, but I realized I wanted to follow my parents’ footsteps.”

“Your parents…”

“The Great War.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a story common enough around here.”

Amerigo blessed whatever gods are listening. This is not a conversation he’d like to have at a packed Winking Skeever. It is the lull of mid-day, where the clients are fewer, empty tables tucked into more private corners plentiful, and too early for anyone to start drunken trouble. Amerigo grimaced with every sip of his ale, the taste overly fruity with a bitter aftertaste he cannot get used to. Hadvar drank his without preamble. Both of them are content to share dishes—roasted poultry, a crumbly goats-milk cheese and the softer, wetter slices of mozzarella. Amerigo, ever practical, ate his share with wheat bread, taking smallish bites not to upset his starved stomach.

It feels surprisingly domestic.

“And you?” Unspoken silence, broken. Caught unaware, Amerigo swallowed, hard, immediately regretting it.

“And me, what, exactly?”

“Your parents.”

This is territory Amerigo isn’t sure he wanted to breach. Not this soon. But, with Hadvar’s admission, it’d be needlessly rude not to answer.

“My parents…” A nascent tightness churned somewhere in the middle of his ribcage. Vulnerability, Amerigo admitted to himself. Information freely given to a soldier duty-bound to obey Amerigo’s new master. A new cause to be swept into. The thought made him nauseous. “My parents are non-existent, Hadvar.”

In Hadvar’s furrowed brow, Amerigo saw disappointment. It stung. But not painful enough to rectify it.


End file.
